


Nearly Historic

by AMarguerite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Era, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 12:31:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7103467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something would have to go very, very wrong for Courfeyrac to be in line for the family title-- and it does. Courfeyrac wisely uses his newfound privilege to punch Lafayette in the face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nearly Historic

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Pip for the beta work!

“Courfeyrac,” said Combeferre, carefully, when Courfeyrac had come bounding into the backroom of the cafe, looking cheerful. “You are-- the ‘de’ in your name. De Courfeyrac. That wasn’t a bourgeois affection, was it? Courfeyrac is a place.”

It was spring, and Courfeyrac was in too good a mood to be much distressed by this attack by participle. “Oh yes, we are all  _ of  _ Courfeyrac-- nice place, by the Camargue. Lots of strange bits of marsh the locals say are fairy made. Court of the fae-- cour férique-- Courfeyrac. The peasant legends are all I wish to claim, however.”

“That’s a-- there’s a title, somewhere, I imagine,” said Joly, a little faintly. 

Courfeyrac looked pained. “ _ Must  _ you remind me? At least I may console myself in the knowledge that I am safe; Courfeyrac is but little valued by the peerage. It has only its wild natural beauties to recommend it, after all.”

“But, er-- Courferyac still is part of the Gordes lands,” said Joly, rubbing his nose with the knob of his cane. “It, er. Your branch of the family is still part of the main one-- I mean, they can’t disinherit you, from what Bossuet’s told me--”

“No, but they can ignore me, which is just as good. Something would have to go very, very wrong for me to be in line for the marquisate of Gordes.”

The silence took on an odd quality, much weighted down by the unexpressed warnings and alarums of the other friends of the ABC assembled, namely, Joly, Bossuet, Bahorel, and Combeferre. Courfeyrac himself began to feel uneasy. He had never heard the back room this quiet unless it was empty. As he took off his hat and gloves, and took a seat at a table with Joly and Bossuet, he began to mentally run through any reasons why Combeferre would need to know the origins of Courfeyrac’s aristocratic participle. Courfeyrac’s elder brother had died last year, not unexpectedly and after a long struggle with tuberculosis, and his father had been dead some seven years-- neither of them could have done anything to make the papers. His sisters were almost all married-- save for one sister, who had joined a convent, after having shown such a marked preference for the companionship of her own sex their mother had not liked to force her into marriage-- that couldn’t be it. He didn’t have much contact with his extended family-- occasionally he would visit cousins in the fancier Faubourgs, but since he was unapologetically and loudly critical of Charles X and showed a marked disinterest in the power grabs of various uncles and cousins, those invitations had dwindled. There were more bulls and horses than people in the ancestral lands of Courfeyrac, so there could hardly be some kind of uprising--   

“Did one of my cousins or uncles or someone try to seize more of Algeria from the actual inhabitants?” he asked, dubiously.

“Not successfully,” said Combeferre, picking up a newspaper and handing it over. “Almeric de Courfeyrac, the Comte de Simaine, died of malaria in Algiers. Upon hearing this news your... grandfather, I believe, the Marquis de Gordes?”

“Yes,” agreed Courfeyrac, unwilling to own him.

“He was ah... he said that there was none worthy, now, to hold the title he had maintained through Revolution, Empire, and Restoration, set his house on fire because he would take it all with him or die trying.”

“How very Egyptian of him,” said Courfeyrac. Then, trenchantly, “He never was very good at geography.”

“I am very sorry for your loss,” said Combeferre, trying out his best doctoral tones. 

“Oh,” said Courfeyrac, unsure what to say. “Well I-- I was never close to them, you know. My father was the fifth out of five sons, and stuck to the countryside. Didn’t make as much of himself as my...” He sighed. “My grandfather would have liked. I’ve only seen the Marquis twice a year, at Christmas and his birthday, and even then I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him. I hope you will not consider me too unnatural when I say I’m not particularly devastated--”

Bahorel cleared his throat. “Uh, that’s not quite all.”

“What else could possibly have happened?” asked Courfeyrac, exceedingly puzzled. “Did my uncle Etienne get so shocked by the news of his inheritance and our grandfather’s pyromania he fell off his horse and broke his neck?”

“No, he’s died in a fire,” said Bossuet, “as have what seems to me to be a really improbable number of your various relations. You know, the fire your grandfather set.”

Courfeyrac stared at Bossuet. “Are you telling me my grandfather set nearly everyone in my extended family on fire?”

“Just the house,” corrected Joly, anxiously. “But some people-- according to the, er... what’s his name?” 

Bossuet continued, “Your... I don’t even know, some man named de Foy who said he had been married to de Courfeyrac dropped off a letter, since he knew this was a haunt of yours, and was so distraught he told us that there hasn’t been a house as cursed since Agamemnon's. All the living heirs came to the house to be difficult about inheritance by your grandfather’s sick bed-- probably the thing that provoked the desire to cleanse both literal and metaphorical house with fire-- ”

“I don’t think my grandfather sacrificed his children, except metaphorically,” said Courfeyrac, doubtfully. 

“Er, well he certainly seems to have tried to make it literal,” said Bossuet. “Well, in the course of cleansing his house by fire, some of your cousins seem to have perished. There was some kind of quarrel amongst the survivors that resulted in yet more death. It was a bit of a jumbled tale, but seems to involve no fewer than six duels, two stabbings, and someone getting pushed off a bridge.”

Bahorel kindly got up and poured Courfeyrac a glass of wine. “It’s no surprise the hereditary aristocracy is rotten to the core,” he said, kindly, “but it is unpleasant to face it. Have some merlot.”

Courfeyrac drank it, too baffled to resist. He picked up the letter and tried to make sense of its contents.

“My mother always did say her first impression of my father’s people was that they’d be difficult about wills,” said Courfeyrac, trying to keep track of the list of the dead. “I’m not sure even she suspected... this. Two and a half stabbings, by the way. The number of duels was correct. Though you missed someone getting hit with falling debris from the house fire.”

Bahorel whistled, impressed despite himself.

“Oh, ah,” said Joly, awkwardly. 

Combeferre looked helpless. 

Bossuet shook his head. “I really don’t know what to say, Courfeyrac, except that you had better change your name. Your house is doomed.”

“Apparently. God, I have no uncles at all now. And hardly any cousins. It looks like I’ve got... three? Cecile, Isabella, and Daphne aren’t listed here. That’s about it. I don’t believe it.”

Combeferre coughed.

“Is there more to say?” asked Joly, dubiously.

“There is this,” said Combeferre. “Courfeyrac, given that all your uncles and all their sons have perished-- it appears that you are now a Marquis.”

“Well,” said Courfeyrac, after a moment. “Something did, in fact, go very, very wrong.”

“Quite.”

 

***

 

“We always knew that your father’s family was a pit of carnivorous voles,” said Madame de Courfeyrac, who had been lured up to Paris by the promise of familial bloodshed on so grand a scale only Shakespeare could have topped it. “I’m just surprised no one was poisoned.”

“Too Italian, I expect,” said Courfeyrac, who was draped over a divan in her hotel room, feeling bewildered and more than a little disgruntled. “I just don’t understand it all.”

“Don’t you, my dear? Oh that’s right, your father never told you about all he suffered at the hands of his brothers, did he? I suppose by that point he’d blocked it out of his memory. They were really quite awful. It was like steeping yourself in the worst intrigues of Nero’s court when we had to go to family dinners. That’s why we seldom went up to Paris and just kept ourselves in Courfeyrac.”

“I thought it was because you were a devotee of Rousseau.”

“Still am,” objected Madame de Courfeyrac, slightly offended. “Taking up genealogy as a hobby does not cancel out the belief that we are all born blank slates.”

Courfeyrac made an effort to nod and then sunk, more bonelessly than before, into the cushions of the divan. “I can’t possibly-- how is it  _ I _ am a member for the French peerage?”

“If only you’d ever taken an interest in my hobbies,” lamented Madame de Courferyac, “you’d understand these things.”

“I am heartily sorry I didn’t,” said Courfeyrac, half-heartedly trying to be charming. “I don’t understand this. Half of father’s relatives won’t speak to me because I’m a blood-thirsty Jacobin.”

“Well, none of them can really speak now,” said Madame de Courferyac, musingly. “As they are all dead.”

“Yes, that point has been made.”

“It doesn’t seem to have sunk in for you, dear. The fact that they are almost all dead is the reason  _ why  _ you are a Marquis. Under the Napoleonic Code it’s impossible to disinherit anyone.”

“I have four older sisters!”

“Well, yes, my dear,  _ sisters _ . The title isn’t semi-Salic, you know. It can’t be held by a woman, though it can be passed down through them.”

Courfeyrac massaged his temples. “Angelique has a son. She’s the eldest. Isn’t her son therefore the marquis?”

“ _ Really _ , my dear,” said Madame de Courferyac, appalled. “Have you forgotten  _ everything  _ I ever said about your ancestry? Since Godefroi’s death, you are the only son of the youngest son of a Marquis. The title passes to you, through your late father.”

“What’s even the  _ point  _ of the title?” lamented Courfeyrac. “The legal class of nobility was abolished August 4, 1789. Why do we have this stupid feudal hang-over?”

“Well, we don’t have the tax privileges any more, which I rather miss, but the title does come with a majorat,” said Madame de Courfeyrac, practically. “You know, the endowed land by the Camargue, linked to the title. You used to like running wild there as a child. I wonder if I should have let you run  _ quite  _ so wild--”

Courfeyrac was feeling a very strong impulse to once again run wild, to the point of fantasizing about fleeing into the Camargue and trying to get the herds of white wild horses there to accept him as one of their own. He would make a better horse than a peer. 

“-- _ and,  _ you know, once you turn twenty-five next year, there is a seat for you in that House of Peers established by the Bourbons.”

“I can’t vote until I’m thirty, so it’s a fairly useless seat.”

“Er, but it still  _ is  _ one, my dear. That’s partially why the title  _ must  _ go to you. Since the title goes with a seat in the House of Peers, it must be passed down through the male line, by primogeniture.  _ Not  _ the eldest  _ child _ , but the eldest  _ son _ , so stop trying to hide behind Angelique’s skirts. You’re the very last of the direct line.”

“Perhaps it’s a sign from God that the title should lapse.”

“Oh no, my dear, then it would probably be a matter for the king.”

Courfeyrac groaned and tried to make at least the couch cushions accept him as their own.

“Cheer up, darling,” said Madame de Courfeyrac. “With the land and the government bonds tied to the title, you have twenty thousand francs in income per annum.”

“ _ What _ ?”

“Very probably more, once all the other estates are divided up,” she mused aloud. “It’s very difficult to divy up the estates equally without knowing exactly when everyone died. It’s the most awful muddle. So depressing too!”

Courfeyrac was very tempted to go on a rant about the unequal distribution of wealth, but realized that, in this state of mind, his mother would only say, “Oh no, my dear, the Code is very clear on that. The estates must be divided equally among all legitimate heirs.” He groaned instead.

“There, there, my dear,” said Madame de Courfeyrac. “You shall have to suffer all the way to the bank.”

 

***

 

The worst, part, thought Courfeyrac, was the fact that none of his friends knew precisely how to address him. Romantics were prepared to accept the death of an entire cast of characters as a matter of course in fiction, but in reality the response was generally a puzzled, somewhat constipated look and an awkward, “Ah, er. Well.” 

Enjolras was the exception, as he always was. He listened intently to Courfeyrac’s tribulations and said the first thing to cheer him in weeks: “Bahorel has just now given me the fair copy of a pamphlet I have to print after hours. Would you like to read the lines aloud?”

Courfeyrac accepted before Enjolras had finished asking. He had always longed for this particular sign of privilege. It was usually bestowed upon Combeferre alone, who was painstaking and had good diction. Courfeyrac happily put on all his blacks (he had no idea how long he’d have to wear them given how many people he was mourning), and followed Enjolras to the printshop. 

As Enjolras would one day inherit, he had his own key, and was put in charge of the pamphlets the various apprentices and journeymen printers could not be trusted to read. The printshop by moonlight was mysterious and thrilling, full of the curving lines and bulky beds of presses, turning the papers hanging from the ceiling to dry into strings of decorations for some fairy carneval. Enjolras lit half-a-dozen candles and placed them around the large metal cases of letters, shedding coat and hat on the way. 

Courfeyrac picked up a folded bit of paper. “You’ve got some scrap here.”

“Hm? It’s just Jerome’s cap. He tried to beat the Stanhope press with it when he couldn’t move the lever. He spent his apprenticeship using only wooden handpresses.”

“It seems the press won.”

“It usually does.” 

Enjolras had by now rolled his shirtsleeves and put on his apron. 

“You know, I could almost take you for a medical student, without this,” said Courfeyrac, waving the paper cap. “It’s... I don’t know. It strikes me as utterly absurd, all these markers we have for class. Why do we have them? Why does it matter to us, as a society, that we can pick apart a-- a printer from a Marquis?”

Enjolras was doing something mysterious with a sheet of paper and looked thoughtful.

“It shouldn’t matter,” said Courfeyrac, perching on the edge of a table. “But it  _ does _ . I-- what I believe hasn’t changed, but people call me something different now and it matters. I hate it. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want it, but I don’t what Charles X to gain what little power I  _ have  _ inherited.”

“Here,” said Enjolras, opening the folds. He had made a new cap. “This one’s for you.”

Courfeyrac at once abandoned top hat for paper cap. He was charmed by it, and relieved at the unwritten message it contained: ‘We are still equals. We are still engaged on the same work.’ 

It was distracting, too, to see Enjolras at work. Courfeyrac did not know enough about printing to tell whether or not Enjolras was of average or above-average skill, but he went at it with his usual serious, single-minded purpose,  his white hands daring in and out of compartments of the case almost automatically. The tiny, dull clinks of the type being slid onto the compositor's stick, the delicacy with which Enjolras carefully transferred the type into the frame--

‘No wonder he’s so good at organizing us,’ thought Courfeyrac. ‘Men are considerably easier to move around than type.’

“I suppose these ordinances of Charles X aren’t very popular, here.”

“Printers are generally not in favor of anything that limits freedom of the press, no,” agreed Enjolras, hunting for an italic capital ‘C.’ “Friend Courfeyrac, it occurs to me--”

“Yes?”

“You have been forced into a trade you dislike.”

“The trade of the enemy,” agreed Courfeyrac, crossing his arms.

“Why not take up one adjacent?” suggested Enjolras. And, in Combeferre’s tones, said, reasonably, “After all, was not Condorcet a Marquis?”

Courfeyrac tried to languish, but it would have been difficult to do without knocking over the frame and ruining the evening’s work. “But it... so was Lafayette.”

“Do  _ you  _ think you would so change in essentials?” asked Enjolras.

“No.”

“Could anyone, even Combeferre, persuade you out of what you believe?”

Courfeyrac began to feel more cheerful. “No, not at all.”

“I may rearrange this type,” said Enjolras, holding aloft the ‘C’ between right thumb and pointer finger, “and reuse it, join it to other letters, put it into new contexts. But it remains as it was molded. Its impression perhaps grows more emphatic--”

Courfeyrac leapt up and would have kissed him, if Enjolras hadn’t pointedly looked at his half-filled compositor's stick. “I just realized-- I have a ridiculous amount of money now. Think how much paper that will buy! Why, I could even found one of those schools Combeferre talks about! And--” growing really cheerful at this last “--Lafeyette cannot escape an acquaintance. The next time he drags a king into Paris--” He made a very emphatic gesture.

Enjolras, very careful of his stick said, mildly, “I’m glad this pleases you.”

 

***

 

To drop out of the law school was not much of a lurch; to take on society was  _ work _ . What was more, it was work Courfeyrac hated. He particularly disliked having to spend hours at his desk, answering letters. Courfeyrac loved to talk, even to people he disliked. Writing to them was agony. He could spend hours at a time in his study, drafting pamphlets, making obscene doodles, picking up books, abandoning them for others, paging through the handsome first edition of the  _ Encylopdie  _ he had bought for Combeferre, and never once manage to finish what he came in to write, even if it was as simple as, ‘Monsieur the Marquis de Gordes thanks you for your kind invitation, but must decline, for reasons.’ That sentence was, more often than not, exactly what he put down. 

(“Would you like me to write, ‘because I am plotting sedition with a peasant, a medical student, and a printer?’” he had once asked Combeferre. 

“I would like you to come up with something a little more convincing than ‘for reasons,’” Combeferre had said. 

“But that would be  _ lying _ ,” Courfeyrac had protested, eyes wide. 

“‘Because of a previous engagement’ would be just as polite a fiction.”

“But decidedly less amusing,” Bahorel had decreed, and that settled the matter.)

“Marius, how would you like to actually be an abbé and come work for me as a secretary?” asked Courfeyrac, loafing on Marius’s bed, in the Gorbeau. “I hate to think of you living here when I’ve got a house.”

“You don’t have a house,” said Marius, who was engaged on some translation work, and not in a mood to be indulgent. “Your grandfather set it on fire.”

“Yes, but I’ve rented another,” said Courfeyrac. “My mother didn’t like living in the hotel. She doesn’t much like living in the house either, but at least it’s got a garden, where she can pretend to be back in the countryside. She’s also very depressed at the size.”

“Rent another.”

“Not the size of the house, but my  _ household _ ,” said Courfeyrac, patiently. “She thinks I ought to have an abbé as a secretary. It’s apparently the newest trend.”

“I’m not actually a seminarian,” was Marius’s really quite reasonable objection. “I’m a law student.”

“But ‘abbé’ is such a nebulous category. It’s anyone from a church warden to a bishop.”

“Yes, but I’m still not an abbé.”

“But you  _ act  _ like one,” said Courfeyrac, wheedling. “And I shouldn’t get along with a  _ real  _ abbé. If you wear black, look awkward around women, and are occasionally shocked by my irreverence, you will satisfy everyone’s expectations. And you already do that  _ without  _ being paid. Come and shake your head at me in my house, rather than here.”

Marius self-consciously stopped shaking his head.  

“Please,” begged Courfeyrac, looking imploring. “Enjolras wants me to hire this new fellow he’s met, Feuilly. A fan painter or something, but lettered. So he’ll sort letters and you’ll answer them. You won’t even have to talk to each other if you don’t like it. I imagine most of the day you can just read in the library. I don’t get very many invitations. Everyone thinks that my family has a strain of madness in it since about ten people all killed each other on the same day, so I’m not that popular.” Then, feeling a little smug. “Well, in the ballroom. The boudoir is a different matter.”

“Don’t be--”

“See!” cried Courfeyrac. “You lecture me on my morals already. You can come and go as you please. I’ll give you a set of keys to the house.”

Marius looked tempted.

Much encouraged, Courfeyrac name dropped some of his callers from that afternoon, old Bonapartists who had served at Waterloo and managed to cling onto their titles though the Restoration. Marius’s eyes lit up.

“You might have to talk to those sorts of men--”

“Yes,” said Marius, suddenly. “Yes, I’ll come.”

And, just like that, Courfeyrac was able to tell two retired generals that the little abbé who had shown them in was none other than Colonel Pontmercy’s son. All three rejoiced and soon got into what Courfeyrac privately thought a rather boring conversation about the mud at Waterloo. Courfeyrac left Marius to his Napoleonic raptures, and went into the library to see Feuilly, looking horribly uncomfortable in his suit and cravat, eying the  _ Encylopedie _ .

“It’s Combeferre’s, so please, take it and read it,” said Courfeyrac. “If there’s any other book you’d like but I don’t have, let me know. I have to rebuild the collection my grandfather burned. You would be doing me a favor.”

“Oh, well then,” said Feuilly, relaxing slightly. 

“I’m off to learn boxing,” said Courfeyrac, picking up his hat. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them that I am out, doing things.”

“Doing what specifically?”

“Things,” said Courfeyrac, airily. 

Courfeyrac’s dinner invitations still went unanswered, more often than not, but he felt more cheerful, having two friends live with him, and when one is an unmarried, twenty-four-year-old Marquis, one is forgiven for almost everything. 

 

***

 

That July, society was much alarmed by Charles X’s series of increasingly poor choices, and the resultant revolution. 

“Heavens,” they whispered to each other, behind their shuttered windows. “Who would have guessed?”

The Marquis de Lafayette had not, nor had he guessed how sweeping this protest of printers would grow to be. It was time to put a stop to this, and put a new king in power.

When he arrived at the Hotel de Ville, he was slightly surprised to see the young Marquis de Gordes there, surrounded by a small group of other young men. It was impossible to tell their classes or professions from their manner of dressing. All were in dirty trousers held up with tricolor sashes, and formerly white shirts torn and stained with blood and gunpowder. Some had retained waistcoats and cravats, but most had not. 

“De Gordes,” said the Marquis de Lafayette, nodding. 

He broke off from his group and ran up. “Sir! Can you tell me what is happening?”

“Ah-- yes.” Lafayette hadn’t heard anything particularly troubling about young de Gordes. The poor fellow didn’t over mix in society, but it would be very bad form to see a man in mourning for nearly a dozen family members at a ball. He was clearly political, clearly active, clearly interested-- there was no harm in it. “Walk with me, will you? I must get upstairs.”

“Oh?” asked de Gordes, following him up the stairs. 

“Yes-- we must let the people see Louis-Philippe d’Orleans before--”

“Wait, what?” 

They were in a deserted hallway now. Lafayette still glanced surreptitiously around, to make sure no Jacobins lurked in the corners.  “Ah, no one got to you yet, did they? I should have thought they’d let you know what we had planned, given-- no matter. Well. We cannot let France devolve into anarchy. We must make Louis-Philippe d’Orleans king.”

“And how are you proposing to do that?” asked de Gordes.

This young fellow asked the right questions. Promising! Lafayette said, “I shall appear with him on the balcony. The people still love and trust me. They will accept a king if I give one to them.”

“The balcony just down the hall?”

“Yes.”

Lafayette was stunned and on the floor before he knew what had happened. The young Marquis de Gordes was yelling (calling on angels for help? Lafayette was too dazed to really follow). 

“We’ve been attacked by Jacobins,” said Lafayette.

“Well, you have,” said de Gordes, flinging himself on top of Lafayette.

Lafayette was touched de Gordes appeared to be defending him with his own body. He was less thrilled when he realized that, though he heard footsteps and shouting, no one was with them in the hall.

“What the hell--” His mind rebelled. “De Gordes! Did you hit me in the back of the head?”

“Yes,” admitted de Gordes. “You see,  _ I’m  _ a Jacobin, and believe that France should be a republic. Don’t worry. I shan’t kill you, just tie you up for a bit.”

“What!” While flat on his stomach and pinned in place by an athletic twenty-four-year-old, Lafayette tried to rise. This did not work. He then tried to turn over and punch his opponent.

“Marquis to Marquis,” said de Gordes, catching both flailing fists and binding them together with a cravat, “I think our titles are idiotic relics of a superstitious, unenlightened, and savage age, and our best hope of happiness is making ourselves obsolete. I know what you’re trying to do.”

“The devil you do,” began Lafayette.

“You’re trying to bring another king to Paris,” said de Gordes, still pleasant. “I shan’t let you.”

And so it was that the Marquis de Gordes sat on the Marquis de Lafayette, in the middle of a hall of the Hotel de Ville. It was not a happy or comfortable experience for either of them, and those who were so unfortunate as to witness this spectacle found themselves profoundly disillusioned by the hereditary aristocracy. A small group of revolutionaries bore off the two Marquisi, sparing everyone the sights of the Marquis de Lafayette biting the Marquis de Gordes, and the Marquis de Gordes subsequently punching the Marquis de Lafayette in the face hard enough to knock him out. 

Louis-Philippe, growing impatient at the delay, decided to walk out onto the balcony by himself, which did not endear him to the crowd. He was pelted with abandoned and broken bits of furniture, rotten food, sticks, stones, balled up newspaper, and the fouler things Parisians could scrape up from the cobblestones.

“You may never be mentioned in any work by historians,” said Bahorel, in the Enjolras print shop, several days later, “but you have changed the fate of France, friend Courfeyrac.”

“It was a joint effort,” said Courfeyrac. “I would never have gotten to the Hotel de Ville that quickly without everyone, and I would never have developed the muscle mass necessary to subdue Lafayette without you. Nor would I have known precisely where to sit on his back so I couldn’t be dislodged without Combeferre, nor would I have won had I not taken Enjolras’s cravat to bind Lafayette's hands. Fortunately Lafayette’s too embarrassed to ever say what detained him.”

“Yes,” said Enjolras, who was busily setting type for a proclamation declaring France was once again a republic, “it appears we are doomed to be a group that nearly became historic.”


End file.
